Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

But this vast number of matches could not be supplied had it not been for the invention of machines for making and packing them. Thus in 1842 Reuben Partridge of America patented a machine for making splints. Others for making splints and the matches separately, quickly followed. Together with these came match dipping and match box machines. The splint machines were for slitting a block of wood of the proper height downward nearly the whole way into match splints, leaving their butts in the solid wood. These were square and known as block matches. Other mechanisms cut and divided the block into strips, which were then dipped at one end, dried and tied in bundles. By other means, a swing blade, for instance, the matches were all severed from the block. Matches are made round by one machine by pressing the block against a plate having circular perforations, and the interspaces are beveled so as to form cutting edges.

Poririer, a Frenchman, invented a machine for making match boxes of pasteboard. Suitable sized rectangular pieces of pasteboard rounded at the angles for making the body of the box are first cut, then these pieces are introduced into the machine, where by the single blow of a plunger they are forced into a matrix or die and pressed, and receive by this single motion their complete and final shape. The lid is made in the same way.

By one modern invention matches after they are cut are fed into a machine at the rate of one hundred thousand an hour, on to a horizontal table, each match separated from the other by a thin partition. They are thus laid in rows, one row over another, and while being laid, the matches are pushed out a little way beyond the edge of the table, a distance far enough to expose their ends and to permit them to be dipped. When a number of these rows are completed they are clamped together in a bundle and then dipped—first, into a vessel of hot sulphur, and then into one of phosphorus, or other equivalent ingredients may be used or added. After the dipping they are subjected to a drying process and then boxed. Processes differ, but all are performed by machinery.

In many factories where phosphorus is used without great care workmen have been greatly affected thereby. The fumes of the phosphorus attack the teeth, especially when decayed, and penetrate to the jaw, causing its gradual destruction, but this has been avoided by proper precautions.

The greatly-increased facility of kindling a fire by matches gave an impetus to the invention of cooking and heating stoves. Of course stoves, generically speaking, are not a production of the nineteenth century. The Romans had their laconicum or heating stove, which from its name was an invention from Laconia. It probably was made in most cases of brick or marble, but might have been of beaten iron, was cylindrical in shape, with an open cupola at the top, and was heated by the flames of the hypocaust beneath. The hypocaust was a hot-air furnace built in the basement or cellar of the house and from which the heat was conducted by flues to the bath rooms and other apartments. The Chinese ages ago heated their hollow tiled floors by underground furnace fires. We know of the athanor of the alchemists of the middle ages. Knight calls it the “original base-burning furnace.” A furnace of iron or earthenware was provided on one side with an open stack or tower which opened at the bottom into the furnace, and which stack was kept filled with charcoal, or other fuel, which fed itself automatically into the furnace as the fuel on the bed thereof burned away. Watt introduced an arrangement on the same principle in his steam boiler furnace in 1767, and thousands of stoves are now constructed within England and the United States also embodying the same principle.

The earthenware and soapstone stoves of continental Europe were used long before the present century.

In Ben Franklin’s time in the American Colonies there was not much of a demand for stoves outside of the largest cities, where wood was getting a little scarce and high, but the philosopher not only deemed it proper to invent an improvement in chimneys to prevent their smoking and to better heat the room, but also devised an improved form of stove, and both inventions have been in constant use unto this day. Franklin invented and introduced his celebrated stove, which he called the Pennsylvania Fire Place, in 1745, having all the advantages of a cheerful open fireplace, and a heat producer; and which consisted of an iron stove with an open front set well into the room, in which front part the fire was kindled, and the products of combustion conducted up a flue, and thence under a false back and up the chimney. Open heat spaces were left between the two flues. Air inlets and dampers were provided. In his description of this stove at that time Franklin also referred to the iron box stoves used by the Dutch, the iron plates extending from the hearths and sides, etc., chimneys making a double fireplace used by the French, and the German stove of iron plates, and so made that the fuel had to be put into it from another room or from the outside of the house. He dwells upon the pleasure of an open fire, and the destruction of this pleasure by the use of the closed stoves. He also describes the discomforts of the fireplace in cold weather—of the “cold draught nipping one’s back and heels”—“scorched before and frozen behind”—the sharp draughts of cold from crevices from which many catch cold and from “whence proceed coughs, catarrhs, toothaches, fevers, pleurisies and many other diseases.” Added to the pleasure of seeing the crackling flames, feeling the genial warmth, and the diffusion of a spirit of sociability and hospitality, is the fact of increased purity of the air by reason of the fireplace as a first-class ventilator. Hence it will never be discarded by those who can afford its use; but it alone is inadequate for heating and cooking purposes. It is modernly used as a luxury by those who are able to combine with it other means for heating.

The great question for solution in this art at all times has been how to produce through dwelling houses and larger buildings in cold and damp weather a uniform distribution and circulation of pure heated air. The solution of this question has of course been greatly helped in modern times by a better knowledge of the nature of air and other gases, and the laws which govern their motions and combinations at different temperatures.

The most successful form of heating coal stove of the century has been one that combined in itself the features of base-burning: that is, a covered magazine at the centre or back of the stove open at or near the top of the stove into which the coal is placed, and which then feeds to the bottom of the fire pot as fast as the coal is consumed, a heavy open fire pot placed as low as possible, an ash grate connected with the bottom of the pot which can be shaken and dumped to an ash box beneath without opening the stove, thus preventing the escape of the dust, an illuminating chamber nearly or entirely surrounding the fire pot, provided with mica windows, through which the fire is reflected and the heat radiated, a chamber above the fire pot and surrounding the fuel chamber and into which the heat and hot gases arise, producing additional radiating surface and permitting the gases to escape through a flue in the chimney, or, leading them first through another chamber to the base of the stove and thence out, and dampers to control and regulate the supply of air to the fuel, and to cut off the escape or control the course of the products of combustion.

The cheerful stove fireplace and stove of Franklin and the French were revived, combined and improved some years ago by Capt. Douglas Galton of the English army for use in barracks, but this stove is also admirably adapted for houses. It consists of an open stove or grate set in or at the front of the fireplace with an air inlet from without, the throat of the fireplace closed and a pipe extending through it from the stove into the chimney. Although a steady flow of heat, desirable regulation of temperature and great economy in the consumption of fuel, by reason of the utilisation of so much of the heat produced, were obtained by the modern stove, yet the necessity of having a stove in nearly every room, the ill-ventilation due to the non-supply of pure outer air to the room, the occasional diffusion of ash dust and noxious gases from the stove, and inability to heat the air along the floor, gave rise to a revival of the hot-air furnace, placed under the floor in the basement or cellar, and many modern and radical improvements therein.